A Brief History of Temple Work & the Internet

GONE! (or...scarce...er...ing....ish...)

While nowhere near being exhaustively comprehensive, this is a basic overview of the progress of the technology involved in performing family history work for temple submissions. 

A long long time ago, way back before the internet, it was a much more tedious and difficult process to submit names to the temple for proxy work.

You would have to do your genealogy work at a Family History Center and would have to look over actual microfiche films that you could order from Salt Lake and look at for a period of two weeks or so on microfiche viewers at the history center (Obviously after horse-and-buggy days and this continued largely up until the 2000's).

You would have to order books or photocopies of the pages of books from various libraries, photocopy pages, research actual newspapers and correspond via mail or telephone and even have to dial with a rotary dial telephone - it was a very slow and difficult process.

Then when someone submitted a name to the temple, there was not really any way to verify whether someone actually had done the work right or if it had been done before. Consequently, some individuals have had their work done literally over several hundred times in the temples!

Then came computers in the 1980's on a larger scale in homes and businesses!  The church began using software such as Temple Ready where you would input your data into a computer program at the Family History Center, save it to a floppy disk which you would take to the temple and they would use that to print out ordinance cards for you and the work began to speed up some, but was still far from perfect.

With the advent of the internet becoming more widely available in the mid 1990's (which I personally believe personally was given specifically for this work and the building up of the kingdom) Temple Ready was able to begin checking work between temples but much was still left to be desired.

New Family Search, more commonly used in the 2000's was used as the next step up from Temple Ready allowed individuals to work via the internet at home on their temple submissions.  It allowed them to check who had work done for them already as well as release ordinance work for others to do.  It also allowed members to monitor the progress of ordinances almost instantaneously (what an amazing age we live in).

However, Family Search FamilyTree is the next version that eventually superseded New Family Search as of December, 2013.  Family Search Family Tree allows you to  attach documents and photos themselves to the LDS database, and has a heavy design emphasis on reducing duplicate ordinance work.  It also allows and may eventually require sources for work submissions so that errors are being minimized and valid and reliable work is being performed.  This in turn presses the members to complete ordinances for those who haven't yet been discovered.

President Hinkley in 1981 prophesied of the coming of an age of increased communication and that this was necessary for the growth of the church - let us put these blessings of the Lord to good use including the things for which the Lord has given them: the strengthening of families and building up the kingdom of God on earth in the last days.

This is a pretty sweet video about the church's efforts in genealogy and to preserve records for others to use.

Family History Centers & Getting Started

Getting started in genealogy - or family history is easy.  You don't even have to have a computer, though its admittedly easier if you do.

The church has Family History Centers that are available for research purposes where you can have free access to Ancestry.com as well as a multitude of other resources including help from family historians who can guide you around while you're new.

To find a Family History Center near you - click this link and enter the info requested and a Family History Center will be found for you.

USB thumb drive

If you're going to work from a Family History Center and don't have your own computer, purchase a small USB thumb drive that you can save your work on, I would recommend two, one to back them up on and label them and keep them someplace safe.

I would recommend getting at least two gigabytes for storage of information and pictures.

Or, if you would like to create an email account just for genealogy, Yahoo and Google both have free email accounts you can set up just for genealogy if you wish.

The Family History Centers aren't open all the time, so prepare and plan accordingly!